OpenOffice Writer is a word processing application similar to Microsoft Word. OpenOffice is an open source software suite, and in addition to the Writer application, it includes Base, Calc, Draw, Impress and Math, all comparable to Microsoft Office applications. OpenOffice is available to be downloaded for free. It is considered open source because its source code is publicly accessible, and users are welcome to improve upon the existing code. The suite can be downloaded at: www.openoffice.org. It is available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Macintosh operating systems. Microsoft Word documents can be opened through Writer, but it is not possible at this time to open Writer documents in Word. This tutorial references features for the beta 2.0 version of OpenOffice.